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David Rowan knows that shunning social networks will make him sound like an "old dude." But the UK editor of Wired is OK with 'old' if that means avoiding the social and political costs of our "ever-greater enmeshment" in proprietary networks. Here's what turns this techie off:

People accidentally share too much: Go to youropenbook.org and search for phrases such as 'cheated on my wife,' advises Rowan. "I’ll bet that most of the people whose intimate details you’ll get to read are unaware that their updates are being shared quite so openly," he writes. "Have they genuinely given Zuckerberg their informed consent?" Maybe not.

It makes it harder to reinvent yourself We all need space to change—privately. "If Robert Zimmerman, of small-town Hibbing, Minnesota, had had a Facebook profile, could he really have re-created himself as the New York beatnik Bob Dylan?" Doubtful. The lesson: The YouTube videos may come back to haunt you.

ppl write all this n try to show, how intelligent they are, now 1st things 1st No one forced me 2 open n account, no one has asked me to divulge my private details on it, my facebook acc is open 4 anyone to go n read n find nothing bout me except a few tv shows or movies i like n my school, big deal ppl know bout that ?

djpars

Sep 20, 2010 9:26 PM CDT

Somebody made an interesting point to me once, about this whole privacy issue. Let me preface it by saying that I value my privacy a lot and I have a problem with anybody who wants to mess with it; I have a facebook account, but it's mostly for artistic purposes and more generalized social happenings. But the thing about privacy is that everybody acts as if privacy has always been a highly-regarded value, but that's not true. It's a pretty recent thing, coming on sometime around when the telephone dropped on us. Before that, nobody had too much extended communication with anybody outside of their immediate area. The worlds we lived in were tiny, small towns and such. And people didn't have tv and the internet to distract them all the time, so they sat around and talked about each other. You couldn't fart at dinner without hearing it being discussed at church. True, your sensitive information reached fewer ears back then, but, back then, those few ears were everything. Privacy didn't exist. Nobody expected it. Probably, nobody wanted it. Probably, that's what people talk about when they talk about that strange concept called "community." And, really, I don't think anybody wants it all that badly now. If privacy was something we, as a group, deemed to be important, facebook wouldn't have the social weight it has. People want to talk about themselves and they want as many people as possible to hear them when they do so. Nothing wrong with that. Just the way of us. I get that this issue is significantly more nuanced than that argument. For one thing, people profiting off of selling my personal information is a sleazy thing to think about. But, on a more basic level, is privacy all that important? And, if so, why? (Not a rhetorical question, there, at the end. I'm genuinely interested in people's opinion on that. The media has taken this whole question of privacy for granted.)